Thursday, 10 May 2018

Here's a new milestone release of MapGuide Maestro. Here's what's new in this release.

mapguide-react-layout support

One of the design goals of mapguide-react-layout viewer was to be highly compatible with existing Web and Flexible layout documents ensuring for the same authoring experience as the existing AJAX and Fusion viewer offerings.

However, the authoring experience in Maestro knows nothing about mapguide-react-layout, so any authoring experience still assumes the use of AJAX or Fusion viewers.

With this release, we have a new preference for specifying the base URL of a mapguide-react-layout installation.

Once this is set, the Web and Flexible Layout editors light up with additional viewer URLs allowing you to load the Web/Flexible Layout with a mapguide-react-layout template of your choice.

Since the UI for this has changed from a read-only text box to a combo box, once cannot easily select the URL to copy/paste. To workaround this, a convenience "Copy to Clipboard" button is included to easily copy the current viewer URL for pasting elsewhere.

The other authoring experience change is that a new Flexible Layout will no longer include Fusion widgets that are not supported by mapguide-react-layout. These widgets are really esoteric ones, so most authors won't probably notice any differences.

MgTileSeeder improvements

The new MgTileSeeder tool has been improved with the following changes:

A new --failed-requests parameter for specifying a log file to log failed requests to

A new --max-parallelism parameter for controlling the max degreee of parallelism when sending tile requests

New xyz_replay and mapguide_replay commands for re-requesting failed requests from a log file previously logged via the new --failed-requests parameter

Improved OGR Feature Source support

The OGR provider has been the primary recipient of my continued developer attention since the release of MapGuide Open Source 3.1.1 as there are many things in the provider with room for improvement. Given this, it was time to also give the OGR provider equivalent treatment in Maestro, so with this release, feature sources using the OGR provider now has its own specialized editor.

Most of the UI here should be self-explanatory, but the Other Properties section deserves some explanation. This is a future-proof data grid for editing connection properties that may be introduced in future builds/releases of the OGR provider.Another case where the OGR provider gets better treatment is the support in the SHP feature source editor to convert it across to use the OGR provider.

This feature was added to improve the SHP story for MapGuide on 64-bit Linux where the current dedicated SHP provider has unresolved 64-bit portability problems making it unusable. However, the OGR provider has no such issues making it a viable alternative FDO provider for SHP files on 64-bit Linux. This conversion feature helps facilitate this transition in an easy manner. However, there's still some glaring problems with the converted OGR feature source, such as the FDO provider using a hard-coded schema name of "OGRSchema". Nothing some python scripting elbow grease can't fix afterwards. Or you can watch this space :)